Zero Days (2016)

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STORYLINE

Zero Days (2016) – The title of Alex Gibney’s new documentary about cyberwarfare has something apocalyptic about it: a digital version of the Book Of Revelations, perhaps. It’s actually a technical term relating to a sophisticated piece of weapons-grade malware developed in the last decade by the US and Israeli security services: it can begin to replicate itself immediately on being implanted. Analysts nicknamed it “Stuxnet”, though the intelligence officers themselves gave their baby the creepy codename “Olympic Games”.

In 2010, the Americans succeeded in installing this device at Natanz, an Iranian nuclear plant, disrupting the refinement process and causing centrifuges to spin out of control. At the time, the Iranian government irritably dismissed this as petty vandalism, but there is no doubt that for a while Stuxnet made Iran’s nuclear technicians look as clueless as Homer Simpson at the Springfield power plant, unable to work out what was going on.

But the Iranians had cyberwarriors on their own payroll and hit back with malware attacks on Bank of America, among other American institutions. And the malware itself grew like a toxic worm, uncontrolled, infecting other systems, all over the world.

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American serial killer Edmund Kemper III stalked co-eds in California at the height of the era of peace and free love, dismembering his victims and tossing their body parts in remote areas around Santa Cruz. As pieces of young women began washing up on shore and turning up alongside rural highways, female residents – especially college students – were decidedly on edge. A lust killer who savored the act of decapitating his victims – and often used their severed heads for sexual pleasure – Kemper’s story is particularly twisted among historical serial killers.